In January 1999, Pierre Daviault, a 24-year veteran constable of the Aylmer Police Services in Quebec, was arrested on 10 criminal charges for allegedly assaulting and drugging three ex-girlfriends between 1984 and 1999. Daviault resigned from the police force a few days later, but he was only sentenced to three years’ probation, no jail time.

In their 2015 book Police Wife: The Secret Epidemic of Police Domestic Violence authors Susanna Hope (pseudonym) and Alex Roslin describe instances of police spousal abuse within the U.S. and Canada, reporting that at least 40 percent of U.S. police-officer families experience domestic violence, compared to 10 percent of families in the general population.

Some officers are speaking up. Lila C. (name changed), a Canadian corrections officer (CO), was interviewed by the Trauma and Mental Health Report to discuss the growing issue of spousal abuse in Canadian law enforcement. Lila’s former colleague, Stephanie (name changed), was a victim of abuse. Awareness of Stephanie’s predicament, and the inability to do anything about it, affected Lila’s mental health more than anything else on the job.

Lila explained:

“Steph and I bonded very quickly and we were very open with each other, which is normal when two COs work together so often. But she never actually told me about the abuse she was taking at home. I noticed bruises on her neck myself.”

Stephanie’s perpetrator was her husband—a long-time police officer of the Peel Regional Police in Ontario. He was a man Lila knew well, and considered a friend:

“At first I didn’t want to believe what I was seeing and I kept quiet for the first few hours of our shift that day. But eventually, I asked ‘what’s that on your neck, what’s going on?’ And then came the breakdown period and she told me everything.”

Upon opening up to Lila, Stephanie revealed that she was frequently abused by her husband at home, both physically and verbally.

“My first gut response was ‘you need to leave him and tell someone’. I mean, how could he continue to work in law enforcement, deal with these types of cases on the job, and then go home and abuse his wife off the job? But Steph wouldn’t do it—she wouldn’t leave him. She felt that she wouldn’t be able to have him arrested. If she called the police to report him, who would believe her?”

In Police Wife, authors Hope and Roslin argue that one factor perpetuating abuse is that many officers think they can get away with it.

Carleton professor George Rigakos explains in an interview with Hope and Roslin: “A major influence in the use of domestic violence is a lack of deterrence. If there is no sanction, then it’s obvious the offence goes on.”

Referred to as the “blue wall of silence”—an unwritten code to protect fellow officers from investigation—officers learn early on to cover for each other, to extend “professional courtesy.”

And when a woman works up the nerve to file a complaint, police and justice systems often continue to victimize her. She must take on a culture of fear and the blue wall of silence, while simultaneously facing allegations of being difficult, manipulative, and deceptive.

Lila explains:

“I mean, I saw her almost every day and it was a huge elephant in the room. We didn’t bring it up again. And though I didn’t see her husband often, when I did see him, it was weird. He had no idea that I knew—I just couldn’t be around him, knowing what he was doing. But there was no getting away from the constant reminder of this unspoken and undealt-with abuse.”

Knowing both the victim and the perpetrator, knowing that the abuse was not being addressed on a systemic level, and feeling powerless to do anything about it herself affected Lila’s mental health and enthusiasm about the work she was doing:

“About two months in, I started having panic attacks on my way to work and even during my shift. I vaguely remember nights where I had bad dreams. It’s weird, I wasn’t even the one being abused, but I felt unsafe. I knew that I couldn’t say anything, because it would probably make things worse. I feared for Steph’s life, but in some strange way, I also feared for my own.”

Many officers face ostracism, harassment, and the frightening prospect of not receiving support when they do not abide by the blue wall of silence. Believing she would not be taken seriously if she decided to come forward (because of her gender) only amplified Lila’s sense of powerlessness and anxiety.

“I know that the system is unjust towards women, and that makes this situation even more hopeless to confront.”

Stephanie eventually left the corrections facility where she and Lila worked, and they gradually lost touch. Lila doesn’t know if Stephanie is still with her husband, and looking back she partly wishes she had said something about it.

Hope and Roslin explain in Police Wife that we are often reluctant and afraid to intervene if we think a friend or family member may be in a violent or abusive relationship. They encourage bystanders to acknowledge the courage it takes to reach out.

There is a billboard in Richmond, Virginia hanging above the interstate with a picture of identical male twins and a caption that reads: “Identical Twins: One Gay, One Not. We believe twin research studies show nobody is born gay.”

Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays (PFOX), the organization that created the ad, promotes the view that being gay is a choice, not a genetic predisposition, despite extensive research showing the contrary.

The claims in the ad are not only false, but the men featured are not actually twins at all, or even brothers. According to the Huffington Post, the face of South African model, Kyle Roux, was superimposed onto two different bodies to give the illusion of twins. Roux was shocked to see his face on the ad, as he didn’t give permission for the image to be used. And…he is openly gay.

PFOX is part of the controversial Ex-Gay Movement, encouraging gay persons to refrain from same-sex relationships, eliminate homosexual tendencies, and develop heterosexual desires. Their view: Gay must be cured.

They consider sexual orientation a choice, and those who identify as gay are willingly choosing a deviant lifestyle. But this ideology results in family rejection and self-hatred among LGBTQ individuals, as well as intolerance and discrimination in the community.

Organizations promoting this view are often affiliated with religious institutions. PFOX believes gay people can renounce homosexuality through religious revelations or conversion therapy, also known as reparative therapy.

Sexual orientation conversion therapy became popular in the 1960s. According to the American Psychological Association report, Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation, different disciplines of psychology influenced practices of conversion therapy.

In response to such treatments, numerous mental health and psychological organizations publically announced that homosexuality is not a mental disorder and is not something that can or should be cured. In fact, the American Psychiatric Association’s Board of Trustees removed homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Second Edition (DSM II) in 1973. And in 2000, they further stated:

“The potential risks of reparative therapy are great, including depression, anxiety and self-destructive behavior, since therapist alignment with societal prejudices against homosexuality may reinforce self-hatred already experienced by the patient.”

The risks are even greater among gay youth. A 2009 study by Caitlin Ryan of San Francisco State University found that young adults who experience family rejection based on their sexual orientation are eight times more likely to attempt suicide and six times more likely to experience depression.

Despite these findings and professional opposition to conversion therapy by both the American Psychiatric and American Psychological Associations, many of these treatments continue to be used and promoted.

Michele Bachmann, a Republican former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, considers homosexuality a choice. Bachmann and her husband were found to be practicing conversion therapy at their Christian counseling clinic in Minnesota.

Conversion therapy is still legal in most U.S. states, though anti-conversion bills have been signed into law in California, New Jersey, and Washington DC. Campaigns such as the #BornPerfect movement are working toward expanding state bans into other areas.

While public attitudes and legislation are shifting toward respect for LGBTQ individuals, conversion therapy is still a common practice, compromising mental health, threatening lives, and undermining efforts of movements that stress tolerance and equality.

The 1961 classic, The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz, revolutionized the way we think about atypical mental phenomena.

And over the years, the diagnosis of schizophrenia has been criticized fervently, with some characterizing it as an umbrella term for separate psychological phenomena that vary in combination and severity from person to person.

Critics of the term have described the way experiences such as hearing voices are conceptualized and defined. The International Hearing Voices Network (Intervoice) views hearing voices as a normal variation in human experience—albeit one of an unusual nature.

Representing a lesser known view within the field of mental health, the group encourages voice hearers to “accept that the voices are real, and to accept that the voices may have meaning (metaphoric or literal) based on one’s life experiences.”

In the interest of communicating different (and sometimes controversial) ideas in mental health, The Trauma & Mental Health Report recently spoke with a mental health nurse (who requested anonymity), whose current research examines voice-hearers’ narratives about their emotional experiences. While not a member of Intervoice, the interviewee’s research represents an alternate approach to traditional psychiatry.

Q: Can you explain the structure and method of the narrative approach you are working on?

A: Put at its most basic, I am following the method called ‘Dialogical Narrative Analysis’, outlined by Sociologist, Arthur Frank. In my work, Dialogical Narrative Analysis examines the stories that voice-hearers have about their emotions and what those stories do for them.

Q: How best do you think these experiences should be conceptualized if not as psychopathological?

A: It would be best to ask those with the experience. At the moment it seems as though they are greatly helped when they don’t dismiss their experiences as ‘illness’, but engage with them as meaningful. Having seen the prolonged effects of both approaches over a number of years, I can say that it’s the voice-hearers and those with unshared beliefs [what we usually refer to as delusions] who clearly have the most to teach us.

Q: Supporters of drug interventions often explain the use of pharmaceuticals for treatment as diminishing the occurrences of delusions or hallucination. Can you comment on this way of thinking?

A: It’s a normalizing practice; it seeks to return outliers to a normal. I’m hardly the first to point out that what is considered normal is subject to extreme change. This is how we get situations where persons and behaviours are rated as mad in one generation and acceptable in the next— like having a baby outside of marriage, or homosexuality. This leads some in the Hearing Voices Movement to hope that what happened to the identity of being homosexual can happen to the identity of being a voice-hearer.

Q: Does this point out a flaw in our cultural and scientific understanding of the meaning of ‘delusion’ and ‘hallucination’?

A: The word ‘delusion’ is a judgment, and in the Hearing Voices Movement they tend to prefer the term ‘unshared belief’. Many would agree that the problem with a ‘delusion’ is not so much in thinking, but in the interaction with humanity. ‘Hallucination’ also implies a shared version of ‘real’ experiences which would be difficult to justify, a concept of normal which is utopian.

Many within the Hearing Voices Movement reject both terms.

Q: Should therapeutic efforts end with the attempt to remove the occurrences of hallucinations or delusions?

A: I think you can see now that I am not altogether in favour of ‘therapeutic efforts’. Too often there is a lot of therapeutic effort, a lot of money, a lot of well-meaning people, and not very much thinking. I am quite certain I would not like to be on the receiving end of ‘therapeutic efforts’. I would like there to be justice and healing in communities.

Even if we were to know the complete neurological makeup of a voice-hearer’s brain, we would still lack true insight into the actual experience of hearing voices. Understanding and accepting the lived experiences of these individuals is an indispensable tool for promoting coping and recovery.

It allows us to see the distressed individual not as some ‘gene-machine’ gone wrong, but a human who bears a certain relationship to himself and the world.